www.spurslatest.co.uk

[mv5869]

I would really appreciate a review of my new website. I put it together partly to learn wp-o-matic, and partly because I am a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

The site is designed to automatically aggregate relevant stories from across the web. I want it to be visited regularly and in the desing have aimed to get people to sign up to the newsletter, write on the comments wall etc.

I'd really appreciate any impressions on look and feel. Would you come back (if you were a Spurs fan)?

If anyone wants to sign up for the newsletter and comment on that that would be great appreciated by me too (you can unsubscribe anytime).

Its at http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/

Thanks!

[Fergal]

My first impression is that your blog could do with some more colour. For the most part it is in black and white and this may appear a little bland to your visitors. Perhaps it might be a good idea to include some of the Spur's team colours and graphics into the theme design.

I viewed your blog in Google Chrome and some of your images were not displaying correctly, such as http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/rssall/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/92571_bolt_h_pl_tom110.jpg and http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/rssall/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/9172c__47761456_redknapp_still.jpg

When I click on the Category tag in the site header, nothing happens. You might want to either remove that tab or ensure that it does something when clicked.


...If anyone wants to sign up for the newsletter

Sorry, but I don't see where to do that on your site?

Good luck with it.

[GekiDan]

Here's my review:
Your site seems to be dull. Black and white colors. Can you add more colors on it?
I think it needs more graphics like the team's logo on your header.

Does your posts have images? If yes, it doesn't load to my side properly. Might be coming from the host. BTW, I use Mozilla Firefox.

Hope you can write a little background about the team. Including history, owners, members an coaches.



When I click on the Category tag in the site header, nothing happens. You might want to either remove that tab or ensure that it does something when clicked.
It seems to have a javascript so that when you hover your mouse above it, a list of categories will drop.
I checked again and it doesn't lead me to a valid page.

[ownedbox]

kinda clean that one might not think the site just copy contents from somewhere else. :D

[Kay]

I agree with what the guys have said, a bit more color would be good. The Spurs football strip is white top and navy shorts, both trimmed with yellow. Is that right? If so, you could add some yellow and navy to warm it up a bit. I'd think about changing the text from black to a dark navy.

On the categories, I'm experiencing the same thing GekiDan and Fergal mentioned. Both dropdown items are throwing a "Not Found" page.

I'm seeing the image fine in Firefox in your Luka eyes ‘biggest game’ post. That's the only one I see. I couldn't find the newsletter either.

Your sidebar is on the sparse side. Do you have plans for that? I have a few suggestions.

Perhaps some affiliate ads in your sidebar that would go to sports stores where they can buy the strip? That would add colour and might even make you some pennies too. Any match ticket sites you can team up with maybe?

What does their team badge/shield/whatever you call it look like? I'd add that in the header logo or sidebar. (I don't know anything about football and it shows LOL. My home team was Morton. Stop laughing. Enough said. :) )

You could add a widget for a YouTube video in the sidebar too. If I remember right you can just embed the code via the Dashboard. I looked and there's lots of Spurs videos to choose from here (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tottenham+hotspur&aq=1).

A schedule of upcoming matches would be a nice addition too.

Consider using Feedburner for RSS subscribers. It has more bells and whistles than the standard RSS feed option in the Meta section of WP and the big plus of allowing visitors to subscribe to email updates. You can also set Feedburner up now to Tweet your posts via your Twitter account automatically.

I like the layout and the font size overall. It just needs a little brightening up to add interest. Hope that helps!

How are you finding wp-o-matic by the way? I've toyed with the thought of using that myself but am loathe to take on something that's going to eat up a lot of my time.

[seanstevens]

Have not had time to look it over fully, but I would say that if you may want to have your own logo created. If you decide to use one, be careful about using the official team badge, a lot of clubs are starting to come down hard on people and forums that use their badges due to copyright. I have seen a few forum owners get fined in the past because of it.

[mv5869]

All - Many thanks for all the feedback.

I have been working hard on updates until late last night all day today. I would love your thoughts. Are the colours better?

The newsletter signup seemed to drop off mid-update but it is back now. Would be great if someone is prepared to sign up (its via Feedburner so you wont be exposing your email to me - its just that I could do with a second pair of eyes as I cant spot the obvious errors anymore).

Kay: I found WP O Matic a pain to set up, but its working fairly well now. Just be careful with your host as it can eat CPU and they will suspend your account unless you have enough capacity from them. If you want to give it a go and have any problems let me know and I may be able to advise.

Thanks all for your help. I will of course reciprocate.

[Fergal]

mv5869 the blog looks a lot smarter and more professional now. The images are displaying and the addition of a little bit of colour really does make a big difference. I signed up for the newsletter through FeedBurner and it worked perfectly. I'm also following you on Twitter.

Actually, I clicked into the "Spurs Latest News" category and some of the images are not displaying correctly there, using Google Chrome - the same problem also arises in the other categories. Examples include;

http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/wp-content/themes/suffusion/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.firstinvest.co.u k%2Frssall%2Fwp-content%2Fplugins%2Fwp-o-matic%2Fcache%2F2f2c9_ledley_tv_plug_may4_110.jpg&w=&h=&zc=1&quality=75&type=m

http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/wp-content/themes/suffusion/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spurslatest.co.u k%2Frssall%2Fwp-content%2Fplugins%2Fwp-o-matic%2Fcache%2F92571_bolt_h_pl_tom110.jpg&w=&h=&zc=1&quality=75&type=m

Good luck with it!

[VJDMorrey]

Hi MV

You've clearly put a lot of effort into the site and it's got piles of information on it.

I'm not a Spurs fan, though I do rate Harry, but I found it interesting and informative.

Good luck with it.

VM

[GekiDan]

You have done a good job in updating your theme. It looks much better now compared to your previous ones.


Would be great if someone is prepared to sign up (its via Feedburner so you wont be exposing your email to me - its just that I could do with a second pair of eyes as I cant spot the obvious errors anymore).
Well, emails of subscribers are known to the site owner who is publishing the feed as long as you follow these steps:
Go to your site's Feedburner settings > Publicize > Email Subscriptions > And click View Subscriber Details.
Email addresses of your subscribers will show up. :D

[Kay]

GekiDan, I never even thought about copyright on the team badge...and I'm one that's always ranting about it when to comes to written content too! Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways and apologies to mv for a dumb suggestion. :)

Colour makes such a difference, doesn't it? It looks a lot better. I'm loving the new Amazon shop too, nice job!

I'd shorten up the number of posts per page so it's better balanced with your sidebar. If you make it 6 instead of 10 that will take it just about level with the Meta box. Of course if you plan to add more content in there, there's no need. I'm just not a fan of long empty sidebars.

Thanks for the info on WP-O-Matic. Much appreciated. :)

[GekiDan]

GekiDan, I never even thought about copyright on the team badge...and I'm one that's always ranting about it when to comes to written content too! Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways and apologies to mv for a dumb suggestion. :)
It's not me Kay, it's seanstevens. :D

[mv5869]

You have done a good job in updating your theme. It looks much better now compared to your previous ones.


Well, emails of subscribers are known to the site owner who is publishing the feed as long as you follow these steps:
Go to your site's Feedburner settings > Publicize > Email Subscriptions > And click View Subscriber Details.
Email addresses of your subscribers will show up. :D

Yes - its true. Thanks. I hadn't realised that. Well if anyone is a Spurs fan or is happy just to help me test you can reassured I wont misuse your email address. I'm not that kind of guy believe me :D

[Lingua21]

Congratulations on yesterday evening. I'm no Spuds fan, far from it, but I would prefer a team in Europe that has a good splashing of England players in it than a team from Manchester that thinks that it has a right to success just because of the power of money.

So on that note how about giving your site a bit of a European theme although I do appreciate that it might have to be just a temporary design.

Marching on together.

[GekiDan]

Yes - its true. Thanks. I hadn't realised that. Well if anyone is a Spurs fan or is happy just to help me test you can reassured I wont misuse your email address. I'm not that kind of guy believe me :D
I know you won't do that so I gave you the steps to find out who subscribed on your blog.
So far, how many have already subscribed on your feeds?

[mv5869]

So far, how many have already subscribed on your feeds?

So far, only 7, including the people from here that signed up.

I want to get the site looking and working well before I start to promote it. I was thinking to use an RSS promoter (like the IcanSoft one) to promote the feeds. Have you tried that?

[GekiDan]

So far, only 7, including the people from here that signed up.

I want to get the site looking and working well before I start to promote it. I was thinking to use an RSS promoter (like the IcanSoft one) to promote the feeds. Have you tried that?
I haven't tried that one myself.
Well, it's good you have subscribers. It'll take more time to have more subscribers.
Focus more on SEO and promote it.

[mv5869]

Thanks for all the comments and help so far.

I have been busy adding more content, and this weekend changed the logo. I hope it looks a little more professional now?

[GekiDan]

That logo looks really cool.:thumbsup: It's much better than the previous one.
The background looks great.

I visited this page: http://www.spurslatest.co.uk/tottenham-hotspurs-shop/
It seems to be that the page stretches even though the content is just on the top fold. The banner on this page also repeats horizontally.

[Fergal]

I'd agree with GekiDan that the site looks great now. When I look at your site homepage the main image in every post is displayed twice - is there a reason for that?

Also the site logo is not clickable, I note that you have a home button on every page, but when I'm navigating a site I like to be able to click on the site logo, to quickly return to the homepage.

[mv5869]

I'd agree with GekiDan that the site looks great now. When I look at your site homepage the main image in every post is displayed twice - is there a reason for that?

Also the site logo is not clickable, I note that you have a home button on every page, but when I'm navigating a site I like to be able to click on the site logo, to quickly return to the homepage.

Thanks for the comments. I hadn’t noticed the logo / header isn’t clickable. I cant see how to fix that with this Wordpress theme so will go into the php tonight. Thanks for spotting!

As for the images, I need to investigate further. I have an automated script running for the news stories and it seems to be doing something funny that it wasn’t doing before.

[mv5869]

Right. The header / logo is now clickable again. It just took a bit of messing in Wordpress and splitting the logo into background and foreground.

If anyone else is using Wordpress and struggling drop me a note and I can explain how to do it without editing the php (which is not a good way to do it because the header.php could be over-ridden in an upgrade).

[GekiDan]

The header is now clickable. Good to see that you didn't hesitate to follow our suggestions.
I still do hope you can fix the link I posted above. BTW, can't it use the same 3-column layout similar to your other pages?
And I also noticed that there are two similar images on the articles you posted. Why is there a need of that?

[mv5869]

The header is now clickable. Good to see that you didn't hesitate to follow our suggestions.
I still do hope you can fix the link I posted above. BTW, can't it use the same 3-column layout similar to your other pages?
And I also noticed that there are two similar images on the articles you posted. Why is there a need of that?

GekiDan - Thanks very much for posting that. I hadn’t noticed the page width was wrong. Actually, I changed my mind about having an Amazon shop on my site. I’ve heard recently that they convert to sales really poorly (and my own experience definitely backs that up). Instead, the Shop link on the main nav bar now just takes you direct to Amazon, with a Spurs search term. That way I can let Amazon do the conversions.

Has anyone else tried using an Amazon store with any success? I’m planning to remove them from my sites and replace with links direct to Amazon.

[mv5869]

Have not had time to look it over fully, but I would say that if you may want to have your own logo created. If you decide to use one, be careful about using the official team badge, a lot of clubs are starting to come down hard on people and forums that use their badges due to copyright. I have seen a few forum owners get fined in the past because of it.

Thanks. Its good advice. I actually had the team badge on the old logo but decided to go with a simple football "swish", so that I dont end up having any copyright problems.

Top advice! Thanks